[2] Her father was a member of the Soviet association football national team which won the gold medal at the 1956 Summer Olympics, and at club level both played and managed FC Spartak Moscow.
[4] She debuted for the Soviet Union Fed Cup team in the 1980 quarterfinal loss to the United States, featuring in the doubles with Olga Zaitseva, a dead rubber which they lost to the Americans.
In 1981 she played the opening rubber in each tie and won them all, over Denmark's Tine Scheuer-Larsen, Czechoslovakia's Renáta Tomanová and Britain's Virginia Wade, the latter in the Soviet Union's quarter-final loss.
[6] At the Friendship Games in 1984, Apostoli won a gold medal in women's doubles, as well as a bronze in the singles.
She rarely featured in international tennis for the remainder of the 1980s in order to concentrate on her studies, graduating with a journalism degree from Moscow State University in 1990.